Gender And Psychoanalytic Treatment

Morton Kissen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138869226
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317736813
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Maladies et allergies

This collection of essays explores the significance of gender in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Areas covered include Freud's formulations on women in the light of object relations theory and the impact of a mother's core gender conflicts on her daughters' personality development.

Freud and Gender: The Script as Artifact

Margaret Foerster, M.S.

Freud left us a script in which the male and female players start with certain anatomical equipment, undergo certain obligatory experiences in an assumed familial and cultural environment, and are thereby predictably formed. This script was enmeshed in assumptions whose validity has since been questioned. There has been piecemeal correction without full examination of how a given correction affected the integrity of what remained. Over the years the field’s toleration for material contradictory with other material in this area has rivaled the id’s well-known complacency in entertaining oppo-sites. Contributing to this have been considerations of politics, loyalties, and feuds disingenuously presented (Fliegel, 1986) in the literature.

This paper will restate the script and examine its assumptions and teleologisms, the iceberg of thinking about men and women of which it is the tip. We will proceed from the more specific challenges to the more general. This is roughly consonant with the historical progression of criticism, which in the early period took for granted the anatomical determination to which Freud clung. The developments of recent decades, giving more weight to object relations, have provided an alternative, less problematical model of gender identity acquisition, and finally make possible a new perspective on the artifact of the script itself.

According to Freud, the early experiences of girls and boys are subjectively gender neutral. They are determined by the successive libidinal cathexes of oral, anal, and phallic zones and the polarities of active and passive. The biosocially ordained ministrations of parenting figures gratify and deprive. Contributing to the outcome are variables of constitution and fateful “accidental events” such as primal scene exposure. During these early years, the mother is the love object for both sexes, and for the girl this is the time when an important identification with the mother is made. Little children of both sexes enjoy exploring and manipulating their genitals, but the girl does not become aware of the vagina or labia and has only local clitoral sensation. Freud’s labeling of the little girl as a “little man” rests primarily on this zonal exclusivity (he sees the clitoris as a “stunted” penis) and secondarily on her still-abundant activity and aggressiveness. When boy and girl discover their anatomical difference, their psychosexual paths begin to diverge. For the boy, the sight of a human being without a penis, while at first denied, reinforces an earlier fear that his penis might be removed as a punishment for masturbation and for sexual wishes toward his mother. Rather than endanger his penis, he relinquishes and represses his love for his mother. At the same time, he strengthens his identification with his father, internalizes the incest taboo together with earlier prohibitions as his superego, and adopts some degree of contempt for women–these operations giving him a measure of independence and narcissistic protection. After the period of latency, his task will be to subordinate pregenital modes to genital dominance and find an extrafamilial object. At this point, the personal pleasure of relieving sexual tensions will coincide with the “altruistic” function of begetting children. This developmental path Freud characterizes as “simpler and more straightforward” than the girl’s. While individual men are vulnerable to pathology, men are not develop-mentally vulnerable as a class.

For the girl, the discovery of anatomical difference ends the era of masculine self-satisfaction and inaugurates the era (lifelong) of feminine self-dissatisfaction (although at this time she is not yet feminine, but a “castrate”). She will never again have any options that do not derive from the “fact of castration,” be these seeking to undo it (via the hope to be given or grow a penis), attempting to deny the implied intrinsic inferiority (by the claim that she was born with a penis but lost it), trying to avoid being reminded of the lack (by giving up masturbation and perhaps sex altogether), “joining” where she cannot compete (constitutional factors are implicated here–the masculinity complex, the active homosexual role, professional life suitable to men, the delusion of having a hidden penis), or accepting inferiority and compensating (hoping to get a baby from father as substitute for a penis, later transferring the wish to a nonincestuous object and ideally valuing the whole man as owner of the penis; further, the cultivation of beauty and attractiveness is open to her as compensatory for genital deficiency). It is the path of compensation that leads to femininity. The change of object from mother to father thus follows naturally upon devaluation of herself and her mother as castrated. The change of zone from clitoris to vagina is prepared for by devaluation and disuse of the clitoris, and accomplished when the long-delayed entry of the penis awakens the vagina out of anesthesia. If the woman is so fortunate as to give birth to a son, his penis will effect some symbolic repair of her lifelong condition of mutilation. In any case, motherhood will license her to turn passive into active as other life situations do not. Women are fated to characterological distortion through 1) unmasterable envy, 2) needing to be loved (in contrast to the boy’s choice of body intactness over love as a firmer base for superego and ego formation), 3) suppression of aggression, leading to masochism.

What gives the foregoing the character of a script is the sequencing of highly specific events with invariant reactions, the fusing of disparate elements all under the color of inevitability. Some of the contributing phenomena come from the world of biology: myelinization, maturation. Others bear a specific cultural stamp, or occur by chance, although they are entrusted with effecting quasibiological changes.

Freud’s earliest major article embodying his theory of feminine development, “On Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), might better have been entitled “On Some Psychical Consequences of the Perception of…” Prior to this perception, the differences have existed since before birth, and so whatever effects they work in their own right are plain to see. Clearly the differences themselves have not prevented either male or female child from finding pleasurable genital and self feeling, from developing activity and aggressiveness and the full range of affects, and from experiencing mastery in various forms. Freud (1933a) is at pains to depict for us the little girl’s liveliness and intelligence (it is his impression that they exceed the little boy’s) and to assure us that “the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence” (p. 118). His postulate, in another context (1924), that the penis is the anatomical substrate of sadism is inconsistent with this observation. It is the perception of difference, rather than the difference itself, that will cripple her further development, by engendering extremes of envy and self-rejection—an assumed invariant reaction. We are asked to assume that her early, more successful kind of functioning rests solely on her “masculine” sexual life, which forms the pattern for it. Accepting, for the moment, the assumption of the early masculinity of the girl and of the patterning of all or most functioning on the sexual, the script implies that if a girl did not see a penis during the early years of her life she would grow up masculine. “Natural experiments,” including, of course, the case of blind girls, do not bear this out. As Deutsch (1944), who in many ways took Freud’s femininity theory to greater extremes than he did, concluded, “even a priori it seems unlikely that a trauma of external and accidental origin should play a fundamental part in the formation of feminine personality” (p. 226).

The concept of the masculinity of little girls rests on several further assumptions. One is that the genitals of women are not an integral system. This was questioned by Jones (1933) and Horney (1926) long before it was disproven by Masters and Johnson (1966). (Psychic events may, however, work against its integrity.) The clitoris, which Freud gratuitously disparages, though morphologically related to the penis, functions as part of a larger system, as the penis does not. The penis functions as a receptor of stimuli; the clitoris functions as receptor and also as effector of vaginal arousal. Freud conceptualized the relation of the penis and clitoris correctly in the sense that bisexuality yields in each sex organs analogous to those the other sex has in more developed form. What is problematic is that he sees the male form as the natural one, the female as deviant and requiring explanation or comment. This view he extended into the psychological: “You [women] are yourselves the problem” (1933a, p. 113). It is by now well-known, if of no particular psychological significance, that fetal morphology prior to the androgenization that occurs in the genetically male is female; thus, it would be more nearly accurate to call the penis an overgrown clitoris than the clitoris a stunted penis. Freud (1905) refers to this undifferentiated fetal state in a context giving the impression that it is male; this biological inaccuracy serves him as template for the “phallic” phase, when he sees girls and boys as all only male.

The assumption that the female genital system is not united ramifies into the assumption of the masculinity of the clitoris, as discussed, and also into that of the anesthesia of the vagina. On this point, Freud was respectfully contradicted even from within his circle of female analyst-disciples, but he maintained his assertion without explaining his refusal of their observations. Horney (1933) suggested that while clitoral self-stimulation may be more common in little girls than vaginal (vaginal masturbation occurs but may be discouraged by hymeneal pain and fears of self-injury), spontaneous sexual feelings are vaginal. She pointed out that the rape fantasies that occur long before puberty presuppose an organ-sense. Brierley (1936) reported the incidence of vaginal contractions in nursing infants, and Greenacre (1950) gave abundant careful clinical evidence of early vaginal sentience. Others too numerous to mention contributed to the definitive early correction of the script in this regard. Freud’s insisting on vaginal insentience before intercourse exemplified the rigidity he showed in his femininity theory. The theory did of course require the assumption: a sentient vagina would have psychic representation, which would imply a primary femininity, which would obviate a deficiency theory of the acquisition of femininity.

In accounting for the contrast between the little girl’s preoedipal liveliness, activity, aggression, intelligence, and verbal and interpersonal advances and her later decline as she moves toward her lifetime of femininity, we are provided with Freud’s (1933a) explanation that the functioning of an individual is to a large extent patterned on his or her anatomically determined sexual functioning. Thus, in a woman, “a preference for passive behavior and passive aims is carried over into her life” (p. 115). We are not told why this should be so, and the human mind’s ability to discriminate between one situation and another argues to the contrary. Female sexuality is here seen as passive rather than actively receptive.

Freud’s script further requires that the little girl feel no longings for motherhood prior to the trauma of perception. A baby must be wanted only as a substitute for a penis. It is this that signals the feminine position has been reached, in keeping with the sense that femininity is based on recognition of a lack. Freud dismisses earlier doll play as the turning of passivity toward mother’s ministrations into activity. In speaking (1933a) of the ways in which a girl’s identification with her mother prepares her for “her role in the sexual function” and for her performance of “invaluable social tasks,” and underlies “her attractiveness to a man” (p. 134), Freud omits identification in respect to childbearing. Child observation (Parens et al., 1977) has since shown that the preoedipal girl’s interest in babies and dolls significantly exceeds the boy’s. It is seen as drive-based as well as identification-based. Homey (1931) found the wish for a baby to meet Freud’s criteria for drives: “the psychic representation of a continuously flowing innersomatic stimulus” (p. 106). Kestenberg (1956), noting that “early vaginal tensions are usually not discharged on the organ itself” (p. 258), speculated that “undischarged vaginal tensions may serve as the biological vector of motherhood” (p. 289).

In summary, the assumptions of the masculinity of the clitoris, the anesthesia of the rest of the female genital organization, and lack of drive-based or identification-based maternal longings deny the girl’s primary femininity and leave her logically under the necessity of somehow acquiring her femininity by some means outside of ordinary developmental processes. Defined as masculine, she is put, in this script, suddenly into a competitive position, the vestigial quality of the morphology of part of her genital system compared to the developed morphology of the principal organ of the boy, with none of her other endowments or developmental acquisitions as part of the picture. As presented by Freud, then, this results in a defeat to the core of the personality. It is assumed that whatever was satisfying in the experience and development of the little girl was so. only by virtue of an illusory belief in the possession of something which, by definition, she did not yet know existed.

This brings us to the question of what Freud considered the state of the girl’s mental development to be prior to the discovery of the penis. As Schafer (1974) has pointed out, Freud’s tendency to work backward from “destiny” rather than forward with the developmental thrust (as exemplified in the use of the words preoedipal, pregenital) left the answer blank. We are left with the script-like “the protagonists go through their paces.” In much of his work, Freud is exemplary in following question with further question; here he remains incurious. Schafer fills the gap left by Freud:

Why is the girl so extremely mortified and envious? Her mortification and envy are not explained by the fact of her simply seeing the difference… One must assume that, before the time of mortification and envy, it was already terribly important to the girl that there be no differences between herself and boys. And to make that assumption is to land smack in the middle of so-called pregenital mental development… I am arguing that we cannot have a simple, self-evident shock theory… The psychoanalyst must also ask about the apparent precariousness of the girl’s self-esteem in the face of the genital discovery… a psychological approach to the prephallic period must center on the girl’s primary, mind-formative, certainly intensely and complexly physical, and ultimately indestructible relationship with her mother… Whatever the girl’s narcissistic vulnerability at the time of the castration shock, it would have its history and find its meaning in this matrix. (pp. 249–251)

In thus bringing a psychologically exploratory attitude to bear on these phenomena, Schafer notes that Freud’s interest lay elsewhere: “Far more than it should have, anatomy had become Freud’s destiny” (p. 350).

Freud seems to be saying, however, more than that the trauma is so great that the trauma-delimiting and -healing processes are permanently put out of commission (he envisions serious ego-alteration even in the best solution). He seems to be saying that teleological considerations require this, that only a psychically hemorrhaging organism could be constrained to a life so off-balance as constitutional and societal restrictions demand of women, as will be discussed later. Femininity, for Freud, is maleness that cannot show the required organ and therefore adapts masochistically to the defeat over time, learning to sexualize its humiliation.

At this point, the script presents the girl’s longer-run reactions to the fact of the penis as outside of the pleasure principle (and its aide, the reality principle). That is, she compounds her losses. She gives up masturbation as well as active and aggressive aspects of self previously enjoyed, and devalues herself and the person she has loved the most, her mother (beyond whatever might be necessitated by rivalry for father).

An assumption, from the realm of values, underlies the posited unfavorable development following the perception trauma. Freud and many of his followers have had a system of beliefs regarding genitals, involving the idea that the female genitals are inherently inferior. It follows that for them, female development revolves around accepting and adjusting to a reality-tested conclusion of inferiority. This would not be mitigated by prior development of femininity because “second-rateness” is a simple fact of nature, a circumstance unfortunate for the girl but built into the scheme of things. Terms like “genital deficiency” and “fact of castration” are used in the context of this belief system not as fantasy but as fact. Mystery is acceptable, as in, for example, a recent statement by Anthony (1981): “A woman is born psychologically into shame” (p. 197). One cannot argue with a belief system; one can only require that the believers so describe themselves.

If penis envy is not recognition of subjectively and objectively verified inferiority, what is it? Here we must remedy the phase-insensitivity of the term. As little girls and little boys gradually and painfully relinquish the possibility of experiences and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Freud and Gender: The Script as Artifact
• The Struggle for Gender Differentiation in Boys: Two Case Reports
• The Mother’s Wish for a Better Self: Mutual Identifications Between Mothers and Daughters
• Gender and Superego Development
• Idealization, Gender and the Psychoanalyst
• The Influence of Gender in the Analysis of the Homosexual
• Gender-Related Barriers to Intimacy
• A Variant of the “Whore-Madonna” Complex in Contemporary Women